


As long as it takes

by eggsinskillet



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, F/F, Short, character introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:34:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29909451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggsinskillet/pseuds/eggsinskillet
Summary: (very) short Gideon-in-Harrow POV introspection set some months after the events of HtN
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	As long as it takes

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my god, I can't write anything nice.  
> Currently working on a mad max AU that's at the very least a lot more fun, but it's slow going, so take this instead.

Gideon stretched out her hands. The hands were not hers- the fingers were too thin and long, the hands themselves too small, the bones on the back spiderwebbed out against the ashen skin. If she looked too long she would start to panic, as she did in the mirror, in the shower, and under the thin sheets as she tried to sleep at night, waking fastidiously in a panic to re-apply her makeup, as though a frantic ghost was driving her to do it. 

She had not seen more than a smudged patch of the skin of her - Harrow’s - face in the last several months. She had clawed her way back from the heart of the river, and the paint had flecked off in the mire, and she had tears streaming down her cheeks in a sterile bathroom as she stippled it back on, saying _I’m sorry_ over and over to the mirror, looking into her own petrified-amber eyes and saying it to the only part of her that was still a part of her. With shaking hands she finished and then begged the reflection again, feeling quite foolish, for Harrow’s return: for a sign she was in there, because she _didn’t_ know what Harrow had done to forget her and therefore did not know if Harrow’s soul had just bled out into the river, replaced by her own, gone forever to the rolling boil of hungry ghosts.

She did not try to do necromancy - she was frightened by the concept, though she did work out, dually frightened by her own fragility. She closed her eyes when she changed, when she showered, when she used the bathroom. She was terrified by everything, but she was most terrified of all of disrespecting the memory of the Reverend Daughter. Some days the terror manifested by setting her nerves on edge, causing her fingers to tremble, sending a cold drop of sweat down the back of her neck, even in the perpetually chilly recycled space-air - was she treating Harrow’s body the way she would have wanted her to? Every breath she took, for those months, she was afraid to have taken wrong. I mean - there’s no guidebook for being stuck in someone else’s body, could she really blame herself?

_ You’re not coming back:  _ she said it to the mirror one day, and then slammed her fist against it, intending for violence. When it didn’t break, she was glad for Harrow’s weak little bird bones, and the image of them lacerated flashed was so poignant and terrifying in her mind that she clutched her head and wailed. She plead her piece to her inner conscience, imagining it was Harrow, as she usually did when she narrated what they were going to have for breakfast, or why doing push-ups would help her later. But eventually she had realized that Harrow was not coming back; or that her coming back was not guaranteed, not an inevitability, and that Gideon was not simply a dead woman living on borrowed time, she was an entire person, alive again.

When they’d first shown her her old body she had balked. What else could have been expected of her? Cam had laughed and said she felt like Harrow was really there again, which should have been funny, but felt like a punch to the solar plexus. And there she really was, Gideon’s body, hooked up to machines, artificially breathing, empty. Or so they thought. This was Eden’s gift to her: to return her. It was not a no-strings-attached sort of soul splicing; she was certain they’d ask something of her later, though she nearly salivated over being back in her old home, where her arms were exactly as long as they should be, and she could reach things in the tops of cabinets, and could shower with her eyes open.

They were frank with her when they said they weren’t sure if her body only remained empty thanks to her god-blood, her demi-godhood, the only gift her father ever had given her: they could preserve Harrow’s the same way, but there’s no way of knowing if the river would fill her with their starving, howling souls. Gideon remembered Colum. She would have sent herself out of the airlock if she had to witness Harrow go the same way. She said no. The price was too great. 

And hadn’t those too-short arms started to feel like her own? Hadn’t she learned to live in the body of the girl she-

She didn’t know what she wanted, in truth. She was frightened of everything, of making incorrect choices, and had no help to bear it. For the first time since her birth, she was truly and wholly alone. She missed Harrow in these moments with a keening ache that nearly cleaved her. It was funny - not in the ha ha way, but in the sad way - how much she’d longed for freedom, how intrinsically that freedom had been entwined with leaving Harrow behind, only to be bound to her for eternity. How their lives had changed at each other’s hands, how sad and long-suffered they had been. How they’d moulded eachother’s futures, only for it not to matter in the end. How quickly and easily she had forgiven Harrow, how suddenly Harrow had regarded her preciously, protectively. If she had only had a day longer to feel it. Ah, if only.

If there was a silver lining, Gideon could not see it. She had closed her eyes to silver linings, as she did in the shower, in the bathroom, and as she changed her clothes. She weaved between anxiety, terror, heartache, and grief. She wallowed. Despairingly she thought she may find a better future here somehow, ever the optimist, and resigned to living in her necromancer body so Harrow could wake up and find that future hers.  _ Look what I’ve built for you, look what I’ve done, I’ve kept you safe, kept you always. I did not let you come to harm. I have been the perfect cavalier.  _

Even to her ears, now, she recognized she had never wanted to be the perfect cavalier to Harrow. She had wanted something different, so intangible at the time. So heartachingly tangible for that brief stretch of time in the interim. The  _ cavalier  _ thing she latched onto was an easier pill to swallow, one -that she had thought, foolishly, because who if not the Reverend Daughter could re-break her heart so utterly- could not end in bitter rejection.

But there was a chance. Hope was not lost, not entirely. If anyone could find a way out, it was Harrow, devastatingly smart. So Gideon would shower with her eyes closed. For as long as it takes.


End file.
